Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”

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While searching for information about ravens for my upcoming chapter of Rubicon Ranch, the collaborative novel project I’m involved in, I clicked on a dead link. Instead of getting a generic “error” page, I landed on the following, which was just too amusing not to share:

The page which you requested was not found on this server, or the server was instructed not to let you have it. There could be a number of reasons for this error. The most common include:

– The Web Master for this page is a Lazy Git. The page which you requested may not have been built yet, and as such is not available for viewing.

– The page which you are looking for may have moved, or been deleted.

– The Web Master may have been working on these pages very late at night, and run out of caffeine. This causes frequent minor errors such as misspelled hypertext links, misplaced files, and mystery documents which disappear into thin air (or thinner electrons). You may have been directed to the wrong page. Mea Culpa. I’ll try not to do it again.

– You yourself may be working under the influence of too little caffeine, and have typed in the address incorrectly. Double check the address, and try again.

– The little spiders living in your computer are feeling neglected, and have decided to play tricks on you. Tell them you love them, beg with them, plead with them, and try reloading the page. Maybe they’ll give you what you’re looking for on your second attempt.

– You might simply not exist. This server regularly refuses service to people who do not exist. Double check your reality, and come back when you have the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (Are you really sure it’s 42?)

If all else fails, you could try sending email to the webmaster with a description of the problem you encountered, and perhaps the universe will see fit to serve you better in the future.

If you haven’t checked out the Second Wind Blog, you’re missing out on a treat. With more than fifteen writers posting articles, there is something for every taste, from Noah Baird’s hilarious take on life to JJ Dare’s more philosophical bent, from Sherrie Hansen’s inspirational articles to Norm Brown’s blend of mysticism and reality. Here you can find contests, interviews and excerpts. You can even find me occasionally!!! So what are you waiting for? Stop by Second Wind Publishing Blog and check it out. Here are a few great articles to get you started:

DO YOU GESTALT? by Nancy A. Niles talks about role playing to get to know your characters.

I never have enough time for all the nothing I want to do, so I decided to do nothing for Christmas. I am such a procrastinator that I will do anything to keep from doing what I’d planned to do — even if that something was nothing. On Christmas morning, to keep from doing the nothing I had planned, I decided to bake made-from-scratch carrot cake with yoghurt frosting so I would have something to eat when I finally settled down to doing nothing.

Leafing through my cookbook, I came across a recipe for cranberry sauce, and I was surprised to discover how simple it was — boil sugar and water and add cranberries. Seemed like a nice nothing thing to do, so I made the carrot cake and set the cranberries to cooking. Then it dawned on me I didn’t have anything to eat with the cranberries. So I cooked chicken and gravy, and since I just happened to have some stale bread, I made stuffing to go with the chicken and gravy and stuffing. I had to make a salad, too, because a meal is not a feast without fresh vegetables.

While all this was cooking, I happened to notice that the living room needed to be vacuumed, so I . . .

Vacuumed? Of course not. It was Christmas. And I’d procrastinated enough. I grit my teeth, gird my loins, got pumped, and did what I’d planned to do.

Originally, my first book was going to be released in September and the second in October, then both were going to be released at the beginning of November, now I’m looking at December.

I understand about publishing delays, but my publishing date always seems to be just out of reach. It makes me feel as if I’m in a strange game where the quarterback told me to go long and he’d pass me the ball. So there I am out in left field, waiting to dunk the ball or perhaps dropkick it home. Play after play, down after down, inning after inning I stand there, bouncing on the balls of my feet, hands in the air, planning my victory dance. But I never get the ball.

I can see everyone else on the team running around the bases, throwing passes, making baskets. Empty-handed, I wait. And wait. Eventually, I know, I will get the ball. But will I remember what I’m supposed to do with it?

All bloggers are created equal. We start out with a blank template, an idea, a hope of words to come, but we do not stay equal. In my journeys around the blogosphere, I have noticed many different kinds of bloggers. What kind are you?

Blogger – one who blogs on a regular basis.
Clogger – one who clogs cyberspace with unused or abandoned blogs.
Plogger – one who plugs away at their blog, managing one or two posts a week.
Slogger – one who blogs occasionally. Halfway between a clogger and a plogger.
Logger – one who logs in frequently to check stats and comments.
Flogger – one who blogs to sell a product or an idea.
Glogger – one who guzzles while blogging.
Catalogger – one who blogs while holding a cat in their lap.
Kittylogger – one who blogs while a kitten sits on the keyboard.
Epilogger – one who blogs about the end of the world as we know it.
Monologger – one who blogs on and on about a single topic.
Dialogger – one who carries on digital conversations with commenters.
Decalogger – one who blogs about the Ten Commandments or other religious topics.
Decilogger – one who has ten or more blogs.
Analogger – one who doesn’t blog, doesn’t know what a blog is, or doesn’t own a computer.

When I was out walking the other morning, enjoying one of the last hot days of summer, a dusty red pickup pulled up next to me. A man with a weathered face tipped his hat and said, “Howdy.”

Well, no. He didn’t tip his hat; he wasn’t wearing one. And he didn’t say “howdy”.

What he said was, “Some wild buffalo got loose. We’ve penned them in the next field for now, but they are very dangerous. So be careful.”

“Do you think it will be okay for me to finish my walk?” I asked.

He hesitated. “I wouldn’t recommend it. The fence is flimsy and may not hold them. If they come after you, they will take you down and stomp you to death.”

Gulp.

So I did what anyone would do. I hastened home.

Got my camera, hastened back down the road. And there they were. I turned on my camera and . . . nothing. Thinking the batteries must be dead, I hastened back home, put in new ones, but the camera still didn’t work — probably because of a loose connection. A bit of finagling, and finally I got the thing turned on.

And took my pictures.

(If the photos seem a little fuzzy, it’s because the buffalo were the equivalent of a long city block away, buffalo do not stand still, and I was unsteady because of all that hastening.)

Like other construction worker, we creators of word worlds own toolboxes filled with necessary implements. We have hooks to hook the reader, glue to glue their attention, a feather or two to tickle their funny bones.

We find nails to nail our points and hammers to hammer them home. We find nuts and bolts to connect our story elements and trowels with which to lay a concrete foundation. And we find pliers for getting the attention of agents and editors, because we all know that task is as difficult and painful as pulling out our own teeth. (Word of caution: Do not use pliers on said agents/editors. They might take offense and refuse to look at your work.)

We need awls and augers (maybe even augurs) to poke holes in our inflated prose, and we need saws to cut away the deadwood. And we definitely need screwdrivers to screw up our courage and we need screwdrivers to drown our sorrows when agents/editors/critics shoot us down again. (A bulletproof vest would also come in handy, but they are too bulky to fit in the box, and besides, they make our clothes fit funny.)

But the most important and versatile tool of all is the chisel. We can use it to knock the chip off our shoulders. Perhaps you’re right and agents/editors are idiots who can’t recognize good prose. But perhaps they are idiots who can recognize good prose, and you’re not writing it yet. (Notice I say you? I, of course, write excellent prose. Agents/editors just don’t recognize my good prose when they see it.)

Chisels will help keep criticism and compliments at more than arm’s length. Too much criticism can kill creativity; too many compliments may keep us from improving. And we can all improve.

A chisel will help pare away verbiage, those superfluous words and elements that blunt the clear lines of our prose. For example, I chiseled away excess from the phrase excess verbiage, since it’s redundant. Verbiage by definition is excess.

And a chisel will help us shape our story into a world so vital and inviting readers won’t be able to tear themselves away.

My work in progress, a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic novel, is metamorphosing into a horror story. I study my words trying to figure out where I went wrong, but they seem to be behaving properly. Does this mean that I am losing control of my story? No. The problem is in the details.

Plausibility in a story depends on the accumulation of consistent, accurate details. Those details are even more important for a fantasy than they are for other types of books, such as police procedurals. An author of a police procedural can summarize or even skip some of the boring details. After all, any person who reads crime novels, follows detective shows on television, or watches documentaries about modern forensic techniques knows many details of a criminal investigation, and can fill in the blanks. For example, early police procedurals gave details about taking fingerprints from a suspect, but today most readers know how fingerprints are taken, probably even had one taken for a driver’s license, so few authors waste words on that particular detail.

On the other hand, only the author of a fantasy knows all the details of his or her world. For those details to seem real, the characters must act consistently with their history, experiences, and psychological profiles.

Although I might find it incongruous and therefore amusing to have a saber-tooth lion spring out of a dark alley in modern Denver, the character experiencing this is not amused. To him, it is unimaginable horror; therefore, to the reader who is experiencing the world through the eyes of the character, it is also horror. A character who finds an attacking saber-tooth lion to be funny is not a believable character, unless somehow I can make the reader believe that the character will react in such a way, which still proves that plausibility is in the details.

Since I am writing to my specifications and not to a publisher’s, it does not matter whether I am writing humor or horror. That the details are consistent and accurate within my story world does matter, and of that, I am in control.

Books by Pat Bertram

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?